Why I stopped recording client sessions

So much of coaching and supervision happens virtually now, enabled by Zoom, Teams, Google Meet and the good old-fashioned smartphone. This makes recording, technologically speaking, a cinch. Ethically speaking, in professions like mine where confidentiality is sacred, recording requires mutual consent, safe storage, data protection, and rules about sharing and publication.

None of those ethical matters made me stop recording.

Through my supervision and coaching contracts I gain client consent to recording, or we agree not to record at all. Our recorded sessions are safely stored and remain unpublished. Clients have appreciated receiving their recordings and transcripts — for independent reflection, for taking action, for hearing their own insights as an observer rather than a first-person reporter. There's also the occasional gem that comes out of my mouth that they, or I, want to revisit.

I recorded by default — again, with consent — because I was operating from a place of knowing I'd need to submit recordings for my own supervision and for credentialing. I was, in other words, always quietly making something for someone else to watch.

Recording has been on for all but three clients in the last four years.

Until now.

I stopped recording by default when I switched Zoom accounts. Recording-by-default was off, and I never attached Fireflies.ai to the new account. Still haven't. It was, at first, purely a function of technology and convenience.

What matters is that I've made no effort to turn it back on. And I don't see myself doing so in the foreseeable future.

What changed is session impact.

Clients take notes now, or ask to pause to take notes, or I'll suggest they stop and write down something that seems essential. "Take a moment to write that down" is an increasingly common refrain; where once we'd say "good thing we're recording" and steam ahead.

The pause. The silence. The act of physically memorializing something essential, by hand, in the moment it arrives.

Something emerged that I'd never known was there. I was always present, holding nothing but the client's agenda. But with the recording off, I found a further room inside the work I hadn't been able to enter. A bit of an "Inception" moment, if you will.

I became more improvisational. More connected to the client and the moment. I'd been calling recording the thing that made me present. It turned out to be the thin wall at the edge of how present I could get.

What had changed was the nature of the thing itself. With a recording running, the session was also, always, being made into something. I wouldn't go so far as to say "content," because virtually nothing has been published. But more of an asset, a record to be stored and revisited later. Not at the cost of my attention. Underneath it.

But there's a dialectic here. One of the genuine benefits of recording is that it elevates your game. You get more succinct. You reach for the right tool, the right technique. You practice ruthless silence. You perform, in the best sense, at a level of competency that an external party values — in my case the International Coaching Federation and the EUROPEAN MENTORING & COACHING COUNCIL. That's real, and I won't pretend it isn't.

But that is not attending exclusively and honestly to the client's agenda. That's attending to my agenda too, and to theirs — the third parties watching the tape that weren't really watching, but that I behaved as though they were. Both things are true. Recording-on can elevate my game. And that elevation eventually has to fall to me — as a matter of my own development into coaching maturity and supervision mastery — rather than rest on the false accountability of more or less big brother looking over my and my client's shoulders.

We've become so decentralized and digitized in how we are with one another. First mobile devices, then social media, now AI, and who knows what's next. Keeping recording off has come to feel like a small act of rebellion, and of humanity. An act of choosing the moment over the asset. A return to the safer place that ephemeral things have always offered us.

So I'll keep it off. I look forward to emergence and impermanence — to a Goldsworthy made of leaves laid along a shoreline, transfixing for the moment it exists, then gone in seconds when the tide takes it.